317: Schrödinger's AirPod

How many apartment fire alarms would you say you've heard go off in your life? When I was a freshman in college, it was very popular for kids to yank the fire alarm and then run down the stairs. And usually about three o'clock in the morning, there was one two week period where it went off like seven times, I think. Wow. Yeah. Then they started putting cameras up on them and put the little exploity die packs in there. So.

The next guy who did it had his arm turned blue. I was going to wait. Did somebody actually do that? Oh, yeah. Was he was he identified? I mean, look, there was one Smurf looking motherfucker at the bottom of the stairs. And he had some real, real stuff to explain and got to talk to the dean, as I recall. Yeah, I'm sure the authorities tracked him down. I was thinking more like mob rule. Did the mass of disgruntled sleepy students identify him and perhaps tear him limb from limb?

I feel like if anybody knew that their friends were doing that, their friends were told to cut that shit out because it was funny the first time and then it was really annoying after that.

Yeah. You know, I guess a dorm is basically just a giant apartment, so it fits this discussion. Yeah, kind of. We've talked about the fire alarm situation in this building before, right? Uh, no. Did I never bring that up a year or two ago when I discovered because the fire alarm box in the entryway is quite visible downstairs and has the name of the company that installed it on it?

Okay. No, I never heard this before. And did I not mention to you that I discovered, I don't remember why I Googled this person because the company is just named after the guy who runs it. Yeah, Steve's Fire Alarm Company. And found an article that this person was being investigated by the city of San Francisco for a fire in the mission and for having been working for quite a few years unlicensed.

Wait, he's working on both the supply and demand side of the fire alarm business? This seems to be the case. Anyway, no license, questionable work, a fire. All in your home. Not a great scene. It was one of those things that you're like, well, I'm probably powerless to change this. I'm just going to try not to think about it. Anyway, this past Sunday, boy, did that fire alarm go off and just keep going off for.

A large chunk of the afternoon. Oh no. And boy, is that fire alarm. I mean, a lot of them are, I guess, just electronic these days, right? I have no idea. I have no idea how fire, like I know how smoke detectors work, but fire alarms, who knows? It's impossible to say. This is the classic metal on metal bell type fire alarm. It's not like an electronic sound. It is literally just a hammer impacting a giant bell.

And that thing is mounted about, as I sit about 15 feet away from me right now, because I sit in a room right across from the entry. You know how this apartment is laid out. I sit basically right across from the front door of this apartment and about another eight feet past that is that bell. And boy, I straight up put earbuds in because it was the closest thing I had to earplugs because it was just going.

So why did it go off? Was there a fire? I think it was a false alarm or a malfunction maybe. I think it was probably less a false alarm and more it just was maybe not working anymore somehow. Oh my God. Fire department showed up. I assume that's protocol. I assume anytime a...

A building fire alarm goes off. The fire department presumably is duty bound to go. I have no idea. Yeah. Okay. I thought maybe as a homeowner, you might have insight into this, but I guess the whole homeowner fire situation is quite, I guess that's all on you, right?

Yeah. Like if there's a fire, the smoke, if there's smoke, the smoke alarm goes off and then somebody calls 911 after they leave the house. Yeah. But I got, I mean, in serious automated system, right? I guess in seriousness, like individual houses are not hooked up to some. fire department alert system right you can do that you could like that's the thing you can do but you you um there's a tax in at least in my town if you have like a monitored alarm or a monitored fire alarm

you have to pay the city so that they'll come when you call basically. Okay. Cause they have to be licensed and inspected and all that stuff. Sure. Most people don't bother, I think. I don't know what the law is here. I don't know if this this building, you know, it's not a big building, but it's got like five units in it, maybe six or something. It's big enough. Well.

I think more importantly, it's attached to the buildings on either side too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's fair point. Also, you know, like we're in the dense enough part of the city. I mean, there's fire stations every six, eight blocks, it seems like. Or maybe that's a little excessive, but there's a lot of fire stations around.

Dudes in fire suits showed up. Yeah. And did they go door to door? No, I just heard him out in the hall talking and the fire alarm finally went off. And then I heard one of them go, boy, that's an old one. Oh, that's not what you want. As I heard them tinkering with that fire alarm downstairs. Anyway, as of like two hours before this podcast, it's all good because new technicians and I emphasize new technicians, not that other company that's under city investigation.

showed up to install a new fire alarm. Did you think about jamming a piece of cardboard between the bell and the clanger or anything on Saturday when it was going off? I made myself scarce out there, honestly. Okay. I thought maybe it was better not to interfere. Okay. I think the bigger question I had was, should I get out of here? My girlfriend was not here. She was at work. Usually when there's a fire alarm, you should leave the building. I thought.

Briefly about leaving, but there sure wasn't anybody else leaving. Death Stranding 2 won't play itself, man. So I just sat here eating my leftover stuffing instead. Brad, do you ever have a good nap that ends up being a bad nap?

I might have to define what makes a good nap or a bad nap, but I think tentatively I'm going to say, yes, I have. A good nap is you lay down, you're a little tired, feeling a little run down at the end of the day, and you close your eyes and you're like, oh, I'm going to close my eyes for like... 25 maybe 40 minutes at the outside and i'm gonna wake up and i'm gonna feel so refreshed a cat nap

Yeah, it's like a brand new me ready to take on the day, the rest of the day. Is that a power nap or a cat nap? I think a power nap is that. I think a cat nap is like if you lay down on the sofa and watch a football game and fall asleep like my grandfather did every Sunday. Sure. A bad nap is when you sleep too long and your body's like, did you just sleep a whole night that wasn't long enough? Or what's even going on here, man? I don't know. Is it morning now?

Yeah. Yeah. So I did one of those the other day. I came home from work at like 430 and I was like, I'm going to I'm pretty tired. It was a long day. I got up real early for some East Coast calls and then.

I'm going to just close my eyes for like 20 minutes. I'm going to set a timer for 35 minutes, so I'm good. Give myself some time to fall asleep, sleep for like 20 minutes, and then power through the rest of the night. And then I slept for two and a half or three hours. That's a long nap. That's like... Hmm. I guess three hours still counts as a nap, but that might be pushing into. Look, what's what's what is in between a nap and a night of sleep? Because it's that I feel like.

I feel like three hours is a respectable Saturday afternoon. Maybe it's the wintertime. It's kind of crappy weather, so you're not going to do anything outside. But it's still too early to watch a bunch of movies. You're like, I'm going to take a nap on Saturday afternoon. Three hours, no harm, no foul. Man, I don't know. That's like most of the afternoon gone. Well, I mean. It's like, you know, look, if you like to sleep, that's fine. My bigger problem is I think like it would have.

It would start really taking a chunk out of my night of sleep by the time I'm getting that much sleep during the day. Well, so, yeah, it's weird foreshadowing there. But, yeah, so I took the I took the three hour nap and then I woke up. I went to sleep at the normal time.

And then I woke up at like three o'clock in the morning. Couldn't go back to sleep. Yep. Well, I mean, that's kind of every night for me, but yes, that will happen. But I was, I, I just, I looked at that nap and I was like, this nap did this to me. This was, this was the nap. This was a bad nap. Well, you thought it was a good nap at the time. It's only in retrospect do we find that our choices sometimes come back to haunt us. Damn you choices.

Okay, so I've been directed to this Mastodon post by grumpy underscore website at mastodon.online. Find Mastodon handle? Uh-huh. I can't. Vouch for the veracity of the screenshot or the provenance of it. I tried to find the source of this and couldn't, but it seems legitimate. You should paint a word picture here. Yes. How UI degrades over time is the first line of this Mastodon post. And there's a screenshot of the Windows run dialogue. You know, when you hold it and you hit control R.

Yeah, or you just go to start and then go to run, which doesn't exist anymore. I was going to say, there is no button for that anymore, is there? If you right-click the start menu, you can still go to run, and it's still there. Oh, and I'm sorry. And it looks exactly like this picture.

Yeah. So I'm sorry. It's actually wind key R now. It's window R. I guess it was probably control R in the one is 95 days. If I remember, I think of that windows key is more of a super. Yeah. These days. Yeah. I bet you do. Weird. Wow. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah, what do you got? This person has a screenshot here of the Windows 95 run dialogue, the Windows 11 run dialogue as it currently exists. Mm-hmm.

And then what they describe as a Windows 11 Insider build version of the run dialog, which I assume this is in testing now. That seems right. This is the part I was not able to entirely nail down. I don't know if these UI changes are coming to a future version of Windows 11 or what, but it's really just an illustration of UI getting shittier over time and in particular... flattening the contrast to the point that it's borderline useless.

yeah so to paint the word picture the top one is the gray the dark gray window bar with light gray um background and then there's a clear box that says open and you can type something in there or pull A dropdown down that gives you the most recent things you've typed, right? Wait, hang on. Hang on. Sidebar here. Yeah. Have we reached a state of advanced age such that we now have to describe what the Windows 95 UI looks like to people? Because...

I might just be done if that's the case. It was 30 years ago, Brad. Windows 95 was 30 years ago. If we could no longer just rely on everyone in the world to know what Windows 95 looked like, I might not be capable of doing this. I believe that there is a significant portion of the audience that was not alive at a time that a Windows 95 computer would have been state of the art. Well, they should have been. Well, I mean, anyway, the middle one is basically the same picture.

But instead of the dark gray and the light gray, it's like kind of a really, really, really light gray and white. Yeah. I mean, what it looks like is Microsoft's sort of. half ass is not the right word, like sort of sloppy attempt or like inconsistent attempt to capture the Apple flat design trend. You know, like it's, it's like, like the bevels on the sides of the windows and buttons are gone. You know, it's sort of.

edge-to-edge color. It's a lot of competing shades of gray. There's no embossing. Yeah, they're not super distinguishable from each other. They also added some text. Because the initial one says type the name of a program folder or document and Windows will open it for you. Just to be clear, only one of those things ever really worked. Because if you type the name of a folder, it's maybe the desktop or documents it can get. But if you like...

type the name of a document in there. It's never going to, that's never going to work. But type a program and then it'll run. Works reliably. Pretty good, consistently. Easy way to launch programs since the dawn of time. The Windows 11 one says, type the name of a program folder, document, or internet resource, and Windows will open it for you. What's an internet resource, Brad? I guess a URL is what they're getting at there. URI? Yeah, I guess. And then the third one.

Just says shell colon startup, type the name of a command to run, and then there's a little run button and another run button. For some reason, it has two run buttons. The word run appears three times in the space of like, I don't know, 100 pixels. Three words. It's like run, run, run. Yes. I'll read the grumpy website's description here. Windows 95, great contrast, obvious shapes, instantly readable. Windows 11, shapes are still self-explanatory, but contrast is gone.

Windows 11 Insiders. What am I even looking at? The only shape I can understand here is the run button, barely visible. Then on the left, there's another something that says run and has an icon. What is it? A window title? Another button? Why does it have to say run twice? Anyway.

this is basically just a grim look into what may be a possible future for where the windows UI is going. Maybe they're testing this in the insider ring and this will never actually roll out. I don't know, but like, I'm going to tell you something. Yeah. This, more than any easily opt-in, dismissed AI features or occasional fucking Bing or Office 365 splash screen or whatever, like this.

If this is the direction Windows UI is going, this would get me off of Windows more than any of that other stuff. Look, if it's as good as the task manager redesign, it's going to look like crap. It's going to be less functional in almost every important way. And it's going to take a lot longer to load. Great. Sign me up, I guess. I don't know. Again, maybe this is not real. I don't think that it's not real. Again, maybe it's not actually coming out to users.

This looks a little work in progress to me. Also, I don't have a lot of confidence. There was a thread on, I think, my Discord the other day where somebody was saying, hey, I'm on the Insider. track for windows uh windows 11 and the right click menu is not deterministic anymore Cool. Wait, are you serious? Yeah. Like if you clicked it too fast, you got different things appeared in different order. Is it just like recently used commands or something?

it is, it was unclear to me exactly what it was. And again, this is like a thing I saw on a discord. So who knows? But yeah, like I believe anything at this point. Yep. Sure. Yes. Well, Hey, what if you could. choose any desktop environment you wanted and then spend half of your life tweaking it to exactly your specifications. Oh, tell me more. That's, I think there's a whole podcast about that.

Remember way back in 2015 when we saw USB-C for the first time, we were like, oh man, one connector that we're going to, it's going to be one USB connector to roll them on both ends. They're all going to be exactly the same. Yep. It's small. It's reversible. Yeah, it was a fucking scourge because you know what happened? You can't tell which cables are which anymore.

Yes, easily the worst part of USB-C. Although, frankly, that was kind of always the case. I guess they did make them blue when they went to 3.0, but other than that, it was sort of... I guess the difference now is there are way, way more types of USB cables than there were then.

Yeah, you got USB 3, you got USB 3.2, you got USB 4, you got Thunderbolt, which also is a USB-C connector, but not really. I mean, I guess it's also USB back compatible, but not with USB 4. Look. Don't forget, some of them have like, I guess, like. I don't know how this works, like double the number of lanes in there or something. There's like USB 3.2, but there's 3.2 Gen 2 by 2, which is like two USBs in one, I think. And then you also have the other direction because you have...

Oh, look, here's a cable with two USB CNs, but it's actually just USB to data transfer speed, but it's for charging your phone. So it's just it just works with power delivery. That part, I think, is kind of interesting. I think it's. You know, the letter is the physical connector. The number is the data standard. I think I think I think USB C cable that can be USB 2.0 is kind of cool, actually. But here's the thing.

They don't ever have which data standard they are on the cable. Well, I think it's worse than that because there's also power standards, right? Like, don't you need specific cables for PD and things like that? I think anything USB 2.0 and newer will do PD because it's a handshake across the data bus. Okay. And I want to say.

there's even like some kind of like audio specific USB cable specification now or something. There's like weird little esoteric USBs for specific audio type applications and stuff. Well, and then this also applies to HDMI and DisplayPort too, because at least DisplayPort has the common decency to not do new versions every like six months. Yeah. But HDMI, the cable looks the same.

whether it's from like 2007 for your xbox 360 yeah all and and hey maybe you can get 1080p out of that thing if you're close enough yep all the way up to today where you can do like 8k for 4 000 frames per second whatever All the cables look the same. I think this is a hot take, but I think I missed the USB hat. I missed the hat on top of the USB-A and the little wide guy on the faster USBs.

You mean when they just built more connector onto the connector? Yeah. It was like, Hey man, this doesn't have enough connector to do the speed that you want. So we're going to give you more connector. And then you could look at it and be like, Oh, this is the good one. Okay. We don't have quite enough pins here. What if we just added a few more pins? Yeah. Hey, you could always, you know what I say?

I say you can always in my in Will Smith's America, everybody deserves more pins. I don't know. I go back and forth, though, because what like what's what's worse, like physical backwards compatibility where.

at least you can plug in your cable, even if the cable is not up to snuff and you might not get all the features or just having to buy a new cable. Like, because, you know, previously it was just, Hey, there's a new, there's a full on new connector every five years. Remember, remember firewire giving way to USB.

and that sort of thing like what's worse 20 years of hdmi or just not being able to plug your thing in at all okay i'm not actually sure i got a better idea instead of the cable getting bigger the cables get smaller each generation. All right. So then you look at it, you know, the small one is the good one. It's the same shape. Hang on. Are you saying that it's micro HDMI is time to shine? No, nobody's ever said that.

I got to switch to. Woohoo. Yeah. It's like your best Mario. Oh, no, no. You want a Mario? Sure. Woohoo. Okay. All right. Put the cadence down at least.

Woohoo! I got a switch too. I set it up. The dock is plugged in. There are a million different ways this conversation could go. Did you update the firmware on the dock yet? I didn't have to. In fact, I was a little disappointed that my dock was already up to date.

I don't know that it has a firmware update for the dock, actually, does it? The Steam Deck does. I mean, there is an option for it in system settings. I did, in fact, check for a dock update and found nothing. Did you do the Nintendo Switch to Welcome Tour? Not yet. I just set it up last night. Metroid is all I have played for the next lander podcast so far. So I've got a lot of catching up to do. But again, there are all kinds of things I could talk about here. Like, for example.

Even though that thing basically has the output of HDMI 2.0, did you know that it actually uses HDMI 2.1 bandwidth? What? Really? Apparently, it doesn't do the advanced 2.1 features, but it will use more bandwidth than 2.0 can deliver, and you get better color depth and stuff. Oh, that's wild. We don't have to get into that. Digital Foundry has info about that if you want to go. I need to talk about virtual game carts.

Oh, I thought you were going to talk about your scanning strategy in Metroid Prime. No, that's just making it hard to get through the game because all I do is scan things. Always be scanning. What is up with the, I've, we talked about virtual game cards, didn't we? Cause I think you've been on the internet in the last six or eight months. Well, I mean, this is, this was previously until this weekend, they won switch household. So I just never had to think about this. Oh, I seem to remember you.

talking at length about this. So you've probably explained this on this podcast before. Yeah, the system is super shit. Like, what is the point of this? Is this just to prevent you from playing your digital games on too many switches at one time? So in the old days, before the virtual game card system was installed, you could have one switch that was your primary switch that always had access to games, regardless of whether you're online or not.

And then every other switch on your account could log in. And as long as they were connected to the internet, you could use the same game on those switches. At the same time? Up to two total. Two max. You have one that's online and one that's primary. OK, so that is the Xbox 360 standard. I'm calling it that because that's the first console I remember doing that. But that's like.

Kind of how console rights management has worked since the 360. It was your home console can play anything and your other console that signed in. Leave it to Nintendo to finally decide that was too generous. Let me tell you.

the worst part about the virtual game card thing i see i thought you were going to talk about the virtual game cards meaning the cards that are basically just a key for the game but don't have the game on them those are key cards game key cards i think is the term for those yeah no i'm talking about this system they have now devised that is effective

your rights management for your digital games. But when you're, again, kind of a single Switch user, I mean, my girlfriend plays the Switch 1 for Animal Crossing a little bit, but it's basically just me. Yeah, let me tell you, when they rolled the system out, I had to go buy one of those game voucher passes for my kids so that she could get another copy of Mario Kart and another copy of Animal Crossing so that we as a family who have bought.

Now, four total, five total Switch devices between the Switch 1 and Switch 2 generations so that we could all three of us play together. That was $100 well spent. Yeah, what you're saying is the system is working as intended, it sounds like. I mean, look. What I'm going to tell you is that they took a really kind of punishing DRM scheme and then they put some nice loot box animations on it.

The worst part of the whole thing is that you have to have physical proximity for the switches to hand off one of the cars. So that was one of my actually. Okay. So that was a question I had, but I just haven't tested this yet, but. I read on Reddit this morning that you can go into your user settings in your profile. I don't remember where this is, but you're toggling on an option that's something along the lines of use online licenses or something like that.

I don't know about that. And apparently that frees you from having to have the switches close to each other. Oh, that would be lovely because I was traveling last month or month before I went to Phoenix and I had the switch with me and my daughter was like, hey, can you.

Share me the card for this. And I was like, yeah, sure. Here you go. She wanted to play Hollow Knight. And then I couldn't do it because I wasn't here. So my understanding, if I was reading it correctly, my understanding is if you have the same account on two switches there.

It'll just check online. It'll check the Nintendo database online to see if you own the game rather than check if there's a switch nearby that has the game on it. I think is how that works. It's a very weird system that seems a little laborious.

Again, you're just a person like me with two switches that you're trying to move stuff between. But you already brought it up, and I already planned to bring this up coming in here. I hate to say this, that kerchunk animation of watching it put the game card in on the screen is real fucking good. I mean... Look, normally Nintendo is not this intentionally consumer unfriendly in my experience. Yeah, well, you know, I can't say they're especially consumer friendly in many cases, but sure.

This feels almost like malicious compliance. It's like you're right. They did. They made a real good animation and like the little guy carries the thing out. You're like, oh, man, this this is a good. This is like a loot box. But for something I paid real money for. Oh, wait.

It makes a real nice kerchunk when you see that virtual card to go in the virtual switch. Yeah. But it's really complicated and it's really confusing, especially when you add the third person in the third switch, it gets even worse. Yeah.

Um, so yeah, I don't have a good solution with this. We buy, if we know we're going to need two copies of a game because it's a multiplayer thing. Like I'm going to go and tell you, I did not buy Kirby air writers despite being interested in Kirby air writers because. If it becomes popular in my family, it's not a $69 game, it's a $210 game. So I'm just not gonna buy any multiplayer Switch 2 games.

Unless it's stuff that I know that we're all going to be really engaged with because it's not worth it. That seems like an outcome that Nintendo would not prefer. No, that does not seem like the system working as intended.

For me, it's just like, and again, I was setting up a new switch last night effectively, but like downloading games and seeing them downloaded on my dashboard, but then because they have that little outline above each game now that, and it's just a transparent outline. If you don't have the.

Game card inserted. Again, this is just a digital rights thing. There's no actual card to insert, but the idea that you can have games downloaded that you own to your dashboard and not be able to play them without also transferring the digital. The virtual game card is just like, why? Like, what purposes is this serving here? Does that mean I then can't play it on my Switch 1? Yeah, when the virtual game card is in your Switch 2, it is inaccessible to your Switch 1.

Can I just say, hey, my Switch 2 is my main Switch now and all the game cards should be over here now? You can do that. You need to do that in the seconds. Okay, that sounds like the thing I should do and then just never think about this.

stupid system again i think if you transfer the switch one to the switch two it does that automatically so that's that's the thing i skipped the full system transfer crucially because i wanted to make sure the animal crossing island stayed on the old switch that's it And that's why I skipped it, too, because I wanted this switch to be virgin ground for whoever decides to dip into Animal Crossing on it. And I wanted the old one to stay on the old island.

And yeah, anyway, it's a real problem. Yes. Hey, Nintendo and technology are a little bit like oil and water sometimes.

Okay, so last week on the podcast, I said some stuff, and then I got about 50 people that responded, hey, you should try NixOS. Oh, boy. And ironically, I had already started installing NixOS by the time the episode, this is, I guess, technically Dual Blue Diaries. cross talk here sure uh for folks who don't know nix is a package manager that builds everything off of one giant text file and or includes hang on i gotta stop you for a second here yeah

I was all ready to come in here and explain the distinction between Nix and Nix OS, but I think you've already got it. Yeah, no, I read the fact, man. Okay, great. Perfect. Because it's like, hey, take it from me, you will get yelled at if you refer to Nix OS as Nix. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. By Nick's people.

So Nix OS is a Linux distro built around the Nix package manager is the TLDR. That's exactly it. And this is to be clear, this is this is one of those refined is not a bootloader things where I'm not just explaining it to be pedantic. It actually helps your understanding of the.

total stack here to understand what each thing is and what it's called. I'm going to say that the entire stack is ineffable and beyond human comprehension, Brad. That is, that is, that was my experience using Nix OS, but, but like, but like you said.

I think it's especially worth explaining in this case because the first place I ever encountered Nix, the package manager, was actually on macOS like six or seven years ago because I didn't want to like... there was some thud around homebrew excuse me on mac os and like mac ports is pretty outdated i think these days and like people were like hey why don't you try nix for mac os and i did and

It seemed incredibly powerful and utterly inscrutable, and I never got very far with it. And now they have a whole Linux distro built around it. So, Dual Boot Diaries listeners will know this, but I have... uh as a benefit of being a pc world contributor i have one laptop uh that has my main distro that i use all the time on which is cashy running neary and all that stuff it's great and then i have another older laptop that i've been using to kind of futz around with different things

so that I don't jack up my main work laptop fucking around with Linux, basically, for lack of a better term. And I had reached the end of my cosmic adventure. Because we had the cosmic folks on the podcast. That interview will be up in a week or two. And. You were looking for the next thing to pervert your Linux experience with. Yeah, and I was like, what's the next most fucked up thing I can try? And I was like, this Nixos thing looks weird. Oh, I'll do the Cosmic install on that.

And then I was reading, trying to figure out how to do the cosmic install. And it was like, none of this makes any sense at all. So I started reading and reading and it was like, oh, oh, oh, oh. Because the whole thing. basically works off of you basically set this big giant configuration file that has all the applications you run, all the stuff those applications have access to, the places where the configuration files for those applications live.

There's some mystery for me around like whether you do open source or closed source or exclusively open source or also do dirty. dirty closed source software and then also things like can your browser access your webcam and things like that if like if you want to do a zoom call or a google meet call or whatever yeah

To step back real quick, my understanding of the Nix package manager, again, seems very powerful. It is fucking a lot to understand. I don't super well understand it, but my understanding is it is sandboxing every single package you ever install.

So in a way that you can always roll back to other two previous versions of each package. It's that. And also everything is built with all the dependencies built into it. So there's no. there's no like oh this application requires electron three six and you only have electron three five so you have to update electron which is then going to break every other electron app on your machine like the idea is basically like infinitely reproducible functional

package installs, and so then they applied that to an entire Linux distro. And distributable software. So you can take, like, if you build a package for, say, Firefox for your Nix build, you can copy that onto another Nix build and it'll just work. You don't have to have all the dependencies for that thing, which isn't super important for something like Firefox that doesn't have a ton of dependencies. But for something like DaVinci Resolve, which has a blue million dependencies.

And when they get out of whack, then the whole thing goes haywire. It seems kind of nice. Yeah. Yeah. I'll just say real quick, like I think the way I describe Nix OS to people, because even underneath the package manager, Nix is also a language. And. I think you said this, like NixOS effectively is a Linux distro entirely built and configured by one text file. I mean, there are ways to include other text files, but effectively.

And again, it's not just a config file. It's like you can use logic in there because, again, Nix is a scripting programming language. You're effectively programming your own Linux distro configuration. The language is more like a JSON driven. It's not crazy. I mean, we're not talking about C here. But what I'm saying is you can use conditionals and control flow and things like that to...

set up different ways of doing things in your config file, but the real magic is that it's reproducible. Yeah, so you grab that file and put it on another machine that has Nix installed on it and load that config file and refactor everything, and it just...

changes the state of that machine and generates a new snapshot. And you can switch back and forth between them kind of at will, which is wild. You can just rebuild that exact configuration on another machine with one command and that text file, basically. Like I thought for a while about running Nix on my... Sorry, NixOS on my VPS, my virtual private server, because that thing is not in my house. I can't control backups of it super well. I mean, I kind of can, but like, I was just like, what if?

What if that data center burns down and all the work I put into configuring that VPS goes up in smoke? If it's just one text file, you just save it from your shell and you're good. If I'm just syncing that text file to GitHub, I can just spin up another VPS and run that text file and it's back to normal in five minutes.

It's a very cool thing that I think might not be for me. I'm not sure yet. So the thing I will say is that it is a really cool thing that I think might not be for me, but I'm not sure yet. Definitely on the desktop side, I think it's not for me.

So I've spent some time. I've got it installed when I was doing my Linux desktop stuff earlier this year. It was one of the distros I was playing with. And it's very cool in a lot of ways. I think the thing you should know if you haven't used it before is.

They abstract basic almost every bit of the configuration that you're doing. I started to say, you're not configuring the underlying services, you're configuring NixOS. But I don't think that's entirely true because it is passing through the configuration you're doing. to those services, but you're using the Nix syntax. You're using the Nix way of configuring everything. So effectively, you're checking the NixOS reference constantly for like...

You want to do something with system D or you want to set up some Samba shares or you want to do just about fucking anything. You need to go on the next reference and figure out the next way of doing that, even though. Once you know what the syntax looks like, you can eyeball it and see, oh, I can see how this translates to the underlying SMB.com for whatever it is. But at a certain point, two things happened for me. At a certain point, I started like...

If I wanted to set up something in my home directory with your standard shell login files, I immediately started second-guessing every normal Linux habit I had of... should I just put something in my .bashrc or should I do this the Nix way? Am I going to step on some Nix thing if I just do it the way I would normally do it? And then that led to me feeling like basically I'm not so much learning Linux now as I'm learning NixOS.

Well, so it adds a level of complexity that was well beyond what I was willing to deal with on the desktop. I think it makes a lot of sense for my server. Yes. Again, my server, I back it up, but it's not like a super robust backup. I haven't tested that the backup works, but the server is basically like a container for four or five Docker containers and the underlying hardware and software.

Really, really doesn't matter outside of like the thing that lets Plex get pass through access to the quick sync hardware and stuff like that. So it's a good candidate for that because it would be lovely to have like. four Docker Compose files and this NixOS config file and then basically be good to go on whatever new hardware I switched to. For the desktop,

The other problem is in addition to having to figure out how to do everything the NixOS way, which is challenging because the documentation is real uneven. Some of it's super good and some of it's basically non-existent.

A lot of it, a lot of figuring out how to do something is looking at a config file that somebody else has posted someplace and then trying to reverse engineer what they've done, which I don't have time for. The other problem is if the applications that you need aren't in their package repository.

that generates that you can that you basically use to do includes and all that and pull nose to pull them from github it's hopeless getting software to run in the nix os way on that thing at least for me yeah so anyway yeah nix os people please don't

be too mad at us. Like, I think it's incredibly cool. It's like something that is, I mean, there are like a million different ways to solve this problem of reproducibility. Like you see, you see the, I'm sure you've seen the phrase like declarative config in the DevOps world a lot. which basically just means reproducible and like, um, it means like text files. Basically it means, you know, it means like, Hey, your configuration exists in some.

like, hard-coded state that you can reproduce a build off of or a container off of or whatever. Like, the need for this is very apparent, and this seems like a really cool solution for it, but it might be beyond me in a way that is just not... quite what i'm looking for i don't know so the nixos community has a reputation uh and a listener i'm not gonna out them but they sent me a message a dm that said hey i'm sorry to bother you but i've got a bet with a friend

After you commented about wanting to Gitify your .files on Toolboot Diaries, how many people have reached out to you about trying slash learning NixOS? I set the over under at 30.5. Wow. And my friend took the under. And I was like, your friend won. But. but like it was more than it was five or six at that point and there was another five or six after that so okay that's respectable well-deserved reputation and like it's a cool thing i i think

There's a future where I could spend more time with this, but for right now, it's not for me. That's about where I'm at. Please don't be mad at us. We love you. Look, you're the dreamers, the madmen.

There's a bunch of Apple commercials about folks like you in the 80s. I kind of want to build a nightstand. Like out of wood? you know materials i don't know would probably make sense and he's just talked to vinnie he's building shelves as we speak well shelves i built a bunch of shelves over the years okay i like this one's in my dining room i built when i moved in here and they've been good

I need some for my office because I always need more shelves in here. But the problem I have right now is that there's like I don't want a bunch of cables on my nightstand, but I have like a watch charger and a phone charger and then USB-C for like. you know assorted ipad steam decks and all that but i don't like my nightstand is just a table sure my solution sorry

My solution for that on this desk, on the nightstand, kind of everywhere is just to situate all the devices right along the back edge of the surface. So the cables kind of spill over the back without really being seen.

So it's too big. The stuff that I have to charge is too big and uneven for that because it's like an iPad has a completely different shape than, say, a Steam Deck or a Switch. Wait. Oh, you're charging a lot of big stuff on there then. Well, this is like where my nightstand is where stuff goes to charge. Okay. You need a charging station. I do need a charging station. So what I'm thinking about is what if I had a nightstand with a drawer that pulls out?

And inside the drawer, there's just some slots where stuff can lay down and charge and there's cables. And then the cables are hidden. I don't have to look at them. Okay. So we have something like that, which is, but it's made to sit on a table instead of going to drawer, but it is kind of exactly what you're talking about. It is.

This one's made out of bamboo. Okay. Wood, but it is literally just a little wooden box. Okay. The bottom is like a box with sort of a false bottom or whatever you want to call it. Like the top where the slots are lifts off and there are holes in the bottom. You can run the cables up through.

Oh, okay. And then, so basically at the top is just a cascading series of like three successively shorter slots. Are they big enough to hold like a Switch 2? No, this is definitely for tablets and phones. This is definitely not for... anything thick like a handheld game device. But for tablets and phones, it's fantastic. We can charge like two or three tablets and three phones all at once in this.

footprint six by eight looking maybe sort of footprint or something but for the bigger stuff i don't know i need a drawer i think i need a drawer i'm gonna i'm gonna maybe i'll dig out the old fusion 360 license and start designing furniture again i haven't done that in a long time start catting yeah catting up the place brad the apple tv remote is a is a real nag really wait

And I think communicate. Well, OK, you know, we've talked about charging frequency and how like regular frequent charging is easy and regular infrequent charging is probably fine. But the Apple TV remote is like a whole. We don't use it very much. Okay. We mostly use our phones to control the Apple TV. My daughter uses it sometimes. Really? Interesting. Because you just pull down from the top. It's in the control center and there's a button and it's just like right there.

I've done it at my parents a little bit. The thing I don't like is having to look down at a device while I'm watching something. I still like the tactile feel. I like learning the surface of the remote and doing it by feel and not having to look down. Different strokes. You're in a household with adults.

And when there's children in the household, then the remote is a like, I don't, if I'm sitting down to watch TV, it's usually for like nine minutes and I'm not going to like spend seven of them looking for the remote. Yeah. I was going to say, in fairness, the remote.

Remote in this house never, ever moves from one spot. Yeah. Then and like the fact I think they put fine my in the new one. So it'll beep or something when you when you're looking for it. I think we had to use that at my parents last summer, actually. Yeah. But but anyway, the problem is. The remote in that thing, especially the new aluminum ones, lasts for like six months. Really? It lasts a ridiculously long time. It lasts too long. That's pretty good. Nope. Too long. Oh. Because A.

It has a lightning charger on it. And there's only one lightning cable in the house at this point. And my daughter's for my daughter's tablet. They're still putting lightning on those things. Well, the one I have is not the brand new one. Oh, you're not on the news. It's like a few generations. It's a generation ago. Sure.

So I have to dig out a lightning cable every time I have to charge the damn thing. And B, you charge it so infrequently, I never can remember where the lightning cable is. So I have to go into my drawer full of moribund USB cords. go past all the mini USBs and the USB micro USBs and the mini HDMIs and all the other nonsense.

And then I find the one HD, the one USB to lightning. I'm like, is this the one that works? No, it's the, that's the one for my old AirPods, which is also doesn't, they ship some weird USB to lightning cables for a while there. Anyway, you plug it in. It's plugged in for like eight minutes and it's charged, right? And then you don't have to do it again for six months. But from the time it hits like 20%, every time you turn on the TV, it pops up a thing that says, hey, man.

You should consider charging your Apple TV remote because it's getting low. And I'm like, man, you got 20% left. That's going to last me another two months. I am very familiar with this phenomenon from the Roku, actually, and it is annoying as hell. Yeah, it sucks.

Like I don't, I'm looking at it. I'm looking at you and you're like 20%. Don't bother me at 20%. Bother me at 3%. Bother me when I'm going to damage the battery if I don't plug you in. Yes. Or bother me when it's going to die today. Yeah. Yeah, I don't need to know that it's going to die in October. Everybody's going to die in October, man. I mean, maybe not everybody, but like, you know, the Reaper comes for us all, man. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, that's, yeah. Yes, that is.

Something to think about. Well, I think the new Apple TV remotes are USB-C. Well, that's one improvement. As I've said, I'm probably going to get that new Apple TV when it comes out, but that'll be USB. In fact, I think as of yesterday, my iPhone is now the last lightning device in this house. No, I'm sorry. My iPad Pro, which is eight years old, is still also lightning. Look, they should put a key charger on there. Just let you put it on the pad. Sure. Yeah.

You don't need a wire for that thing. Close it up. Seal it up. Keep all the goo. Like, look, kid remote, it's bad. I need rubbing alcohol on the outside of that thing to get all the sticky shit off. Mm-hmm.

Okay, where to start here? We both bought AirPods. Pros. Both of the people who live in your house. Yes, my partner and I both over the Black Friday, I think I mentioned Apple had some deals. A lot of headphone stuff here. I didn't know that you were both professionals, but I'll allow it. Well, we are professionals at getting mad at each other because one of us is listening to a podcast and not paying attention to the other.

Are you the victim here? Are you the person who did the bad thing? It very much goes back and forth. This is a this is a I got it from her. She was she was an early adopter in the listening to podcasts constantly around the house while doing things.

My partner does the same thing. And I came to that somewhat later, but like she's had, she's always had kind of a succession of like $30 earbuds that she was perfectly happy with. And then I told her on black Friday, like, Hey, they're giving $50 back on AirPods. They've got this transparency mode on them. Yeah. What if we could still understand each other while we've got, you know, not only are we listening to podcasts, but most earbuds are made to block sound from entering your ears.

Yeah, they're like earplugs with speakers at them. I don't know about you, but it really stokes my anxiety when I have the earbuds in and cannot hear anything around me and somebody starts talking to me. No, I love the blessed silence. I see their lips moving. I hear nothing. I'm like, this is working as intended.

Because it's like a five plus second process to like pause everything and pull the earphones out to hear it anyway. That's the best part about the AirPods. You just take it out and it pauses. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. Have you never done that? So we haven't opened up yet. I haven't actually tried the AirPods yet, but I'm very excited. Extremely Brad. This is like literally the thing I was going to get some anyway, because I needed some better noise canceling headphones for airplanes and stuff. But I literally.

Probably the thing that pushed her over the edge to also get some is, hey, we can both listen to stuff around the house and still talk to each other. The other part about the headphone etiquette, especially with the independent ones, because the problem I have in my house is that one of us.

has instead of like she listens with one ear in and one ear out so if you're on the wrong and she has hair that covers your ears so if i'm on the wrong side she's never going to hear me oh wow on the right side she totally hears me the guessing game of that is yeah it's like schrodinger's ear pod sure but the but the other thing is

Instead of taking them out and putting them back in the case where they go, so they get charged back up in four minutes or whatever it takes, like 15 minutes, you get like most of the charge back in one of those AirPods. Really? Yeah, they charge fast. I already bought these things, but they just get better and better.

instead of doing that she just puts them in her pocket and then we get to play the where's my airpod game right which is a terrible game because it should always be either in your ear Or in the case. Those are just two places. I have also only had cheaper like $30 earbuds. Earbuds? Yes, the transition between earbud and AirPod is difficult for the brain.

It turns out. But anyway, I, a hundred percent, I can't stand having loose air. You're almost did it again. Yeah, no air, but should always be tied up. Like, like when I got to the store or something and I've been walking and listening to stuff, like having to just put the earbuds in my pocket.

for five minutes is like because you're going to skip past like you're going to accidentally make them start playing the thing you were listening to again and you're going to lose five or ten minutes and you have to figure out which way is back in which way

Yeah, look, that's what that inside jacket pocket's for. You put the little case in there and then you put the air pockets back in there and you're good to go. I should just start bringing the case with me. Although that case, the whole thing seems nice enough that losing that case seems like it would be a real problem. They'll happily sell you another one for $80. I bet.

I bet. Okay, so, okay, point two on the headphone thing. Yeah. I also, I just, this is the season of upgrading Apple stuff, apparently. Yeah. I think I'm just about convinced to probably get the new Apple TV when it comes out, but it didn't make it out by the Christmas shopping season as all the analysts said it would.

It's almost like the analysts don't have any idea more what they're talking about than we do. Yeah, well, or this was like based on some what seemed like pretty good Intel. The current rumor is that they have delayed the because it's not just a new Apple TV. It's also a new HomePod is rumored. Oh, and supposedly they're going to ship with new Siri AI features. Just what I was hoping for. Yeah, right. Right. But so the rumor is that they are maybe holding those devices back until the AI stuff is.

Good. In a better place. Yes. Which I'm not happy about. That's going to be a while. Because there's going to be a fair amount of movie watching probably over the holiday break. Yeah. And. Yet another selling point on the AirPods was you talking about just hooking the AirPods straight to the Apple TV and not having to deal with any in-between sound delivery bullshit. Yeah, it's fantastic. Literally one of the top three things that I like best about it.

So in the interim, thinking about dusting off some crappy old Bluetooth headphones, or I guess I could use the AirPods for this, but I've got some, I've got some like full size, like cans, you know, I've got a. A couple of okay sets of like bigger Bluetooth headphones. I was thinking about what if I paired those directly with my television? I have no idea if that's even possible. Is that asking for trouble? Bluetooth wasn't invented when it was made. Sure.

It is possible on my TV. It's a Google TV, which basically runs Android. And as far as I can tell, it is possible to pair headphones with your TV. You pair two sets of headphones, so you both have headphones at the same time? In fact...

Because that's an Apple TV feature. That does sound useful, but it's actually not necessary because the only scenario where I need to wear headphones is where she has gone to bed first, which is every night because she goes to bed very early. Yeah, yeah. So this is purely... Because right now I just run a giant headphone cord across the living room from the receiver. That works too. So anyway, like...

I'm going to say everything on that TV works just shoddily enough that I am not expecting a great experience out of pairing headphones straight with the TV. Can you do it with the receiver? Uh, no. I think our receiver is only Bluetooth in, right? Yes. Yes. So this is, I think you have a pretty similar Sony. I think we have the exact same Sony actually. It's the exact same. Yes. So we can take Bluetooth audio in. I don't think it can pair audio out. And also.

And also that's a pretty old receiver at this point. I don't know that it would be so latency is the thing I'm mainly worried about. Cause like, yeah, there's like, if there's like noticeable lag on people's lip flap versus their voices, like that's not, that's a nonstop. That would make me crazy.

I don't know. You should try it out and let it report back. Yeah, that sounds like a good trip report for the future. The thing that I miss is the ability to pair consoles, like to pair the Switch or whatever.

while it's on the tv to the headphones because that's you don't get that with apple tv that's the one downside is that you only get the things that come through the apple tv it's the same reason like we haven't replaced our big giant receiver and speakers with just like a couple of home pods like normal people do at this point or a soundbar

It's the same problem. That's why I thought to pair them with the TV because the TV gets all the audio for anything being played on the TV. It's downstream of all the devices. I'll give it a shot. I don't have high hopes, but we'll see.

Okay, I've talked about it before, but it's gotten cold. It's been like, not just...

California cold. It's been actually cold the last week or so. What is going on? I heard that we had La Nina this year, and I have no idea what the effects of that are, but it is so cold here. It's in the mid-40s here, which is like... bitterly cold by san francisco standards yeah and and i know that everybody from wisconsin and and like minnesota is going like oh 40s ha ha ha you mean negative 40s that's real cold

But when you live in a house that has single wall construction and no insulation and like single pane glass because it's California, 40s is cold as hell. That is always the thing. Cool people don't roll their eyes at the travails of people in other climates. Yeah.

Because cool people understand that typically construction and lifestyles and infrastructure are adapted to the typical conditions of a given area, not the extreme conditions. And I was talking to a friend the other day who's from Minnesota and lives here. now and was like, yeah, no, I've never been cold like this. Because in Minnesota, when you go into a house or a building or an office or a shop, it's warm inside in the wintertime. And in here, it's just cold everywhere. Everything's cold.

It's the same thing when it's like, you know, the three days a year that is 95 degrees here and we're talking about how hot it is and people roll their eyes at that. And nobody has air conditioning. Nobody has air conditioning. We don't even have ceiling fans in this house. The best we have are little fans that we buy and plug into the wall. There's no relief from it because people don't normally deal with it.

The solution to a heat wave in San Francisco is you buy AMC MoviePass and then you go set up the Metreon and watch every movie that they have at least once or twice. Now you're talking. Anyway. It's cold here. So I did two things. One. is that i took the duvet and i sat down on the bed and i put a movie on and put the airpods on and i just i redistributed all the down from the baffles and the duvet so it's all nice and even again because you know

Over the year, it gets kind of redistributed and it gets lumpy and you need it fluff. You got to fluff it. But I also put the heated mattress pad back on. Have we talked about the heated mattress pad before? This is on the couch when you're still awake.

No, no, no, no. You're falling. This is on the bed. This is, this is, you know, a mattress pad, the thing between the mattress and the sheets. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah. Sorry. I was envisioning like an electric blanket, basically like a portable thing. No, no, no. This is an installation.

So this, this, this, you turn on before you get in bed and when you get into the bed, it's all cozy. Yeah. Pre-warmed. I've been having the experience of going to bed at night and the sheets are so cold. I almost can't stand to lie. Yeah, no, you don't have to do the leg shimmy to warm it up. You're not relying on friction to warm it up. Is this just electric? Just electricity. Okay. They're getting wild with some of this stuff. Have you seen these like...

whole bed contraptions where there's there's what looks like a tower PC off to the side of the bed. It's basically like a water pump and they circulate like warm water through. So I'm a cold sleeper. I'm always cold. So that's the thing I was going to ask here, because if I did the thing you're describing, and I don't know if you even leave it on at night or not. Very rarely. If it's really, really cold, I leave it on, but generally no. Okay, because if I...

I am prone to waking up drenched in sweat no matter what I do. Never a problem. I have to be very careful about how many blankets I pile on myself, so this is probably not an option for me, but it sounds pretty nice. A friend of the show, Wes Penland, was talking the other day about buying one of those things that you were talking about. Oh, yeah. The chiller. Because it's both a chiller and a heater is the thing. But they're also like...

The heated mattress pad is like $100, which is a premium over a non-heated mattress pad, but it's not like outside the roof. The chillers and heaters are like multiple thousand dollars. Those things are a lot from what I've seen. It's pricey. But the heated mattress pad, that, the flannel sheets, the redistributed down in the Dufay, it's good sleeping right now. Now, you don't feel any of the wiring in there? Is there enough? This is not a princess in the pee sort of situation.

so there's a um the plug where it comes in is at either the foot or the head of the bed and if it's the head your pillows are on top of it you don't notice unless i guess if you put your hand under the pillows you might notice if it's at the foot it you might

bump into it we put it at the head just because of where the plugs are in the house so is there is there not like a wiring just kind of arrangement throughout the pad though there is but it's like there's probably under the sheets and under the padding like okay

The mattress pad's pretty padded compared to a normal one. So it's almost, it's not quite like topper thickness, but it's like, it's pretty beefy. All right. But, and like, it's also, it doesn't get hot enough. Even if you turn it on full blast that like.

If you had the comforter off and you turn it on and left it on for 20 minutes and came back, it's not going to feel warm. That heat's just going to radiate away because it's not a ton of heat. So it's not even as much as an electric blanket or a heating pad or something like that.

If things keep going the way they're going around here, you might be selling me on this. Look, it'll ratchet up your cozy to a whole new level. Okay, went on a little bit of a spending spree this Black Friday, although it's kind of...

becoming the case that I don't buy things outside of Black Friday these days. Tis the season. And also, most half of these are work purchases anyway, but I bought this external SSD that I mentioned. In fact, you know, it's a... It's a Samsung 990 Pro, which is just a bare SSD that goes in your PC.

That might be the last SSD, four terabyte SSD that's ever manufactured the way things are going. That seems distinctly possible. That's in fact what accelerated my plans to get one. And there was an OK Black Friday sale on it. And there was a sale on this enclosure. which I don't have the exact name in front of me. It's made by Hyper. It is the Hyper Next USB 4 something, something SSD.

Yeah, it looks like a brick shithouse, man. It is made entirely of aluminum. It's solid as hell. You could kind of chuck it at somebody and probably do some damage, actually. But it's USB 4. Theoretically, it's 40 gigabits per second. Although it turns out, I knew this from the user reviews, but I verified the cable they include is nowhere near USB 4 in speed. Well, hold on. What USB is it?

I don't know. I couldn't tell you. Who could say? How fast does the transfer go when you plug it in? The transfer, I copied a large movie file to it and got 700 megabytes a second. Oh, so it's USB 3.2 speeds. Still pretty good, to be clear. Still pretty good, but...

It's not the multiple gigabytes per second that a USB 4 cable would deliver. Anyway, I'm going to need a cable. They're 15 bucks. It's fine. The real question is it's four terabytes. And what am I going to do with all of that space? So this is. This is the problem. Like I have a big USB thumb drive that I have a Ventoy on, but it feels a little bit gratuitous to have a one terabyte USB Ventoy thumb drive.

sure so i partitioned i had another partition these files on there right that's the plan drivers and stuff like that but like Four terabytes is a whole other world. It's a lot. And I have a MacBook Pro that I work on. I work on Windows on my desktop. I already have Linux server and intend to be doing some Linux desktop stuff at some point soon.

Are you doing ex fat? What are you? That's that's that's that's question. Number one is, OK, here's the partition map I have. Oh, boy. Here's what I think. I probably am going to make an EFI system partition at the front of it just in case. Just when you want to boot off of it. Like just a one gigabyte EFI, you know, a FAT32 partition that I can put boot loaders and stuff on if I say I ever want to install Linux to this thing. Or, you know, you can use...

stuff like Rufus to gen up a portable windows install as well. Oh yeah. Fuck. I might do that. I used to have one of those. I might. Okay. Hold on. You also, Oh, To have a portable bootable Windows. Yes. You can also do Ventoy and just do all those things in images and then put those images in a folder because that's much easier than having to burn that stuff over and over again. I'll make a one gigabyte EFI system partition just in case.

I'm thinking, so yes, like you said, going across all those OSs, I think XFAT is the only guaranteed cross-platform file system, as far as I can tell. Yeah, I mean, the other thing you could do... this is the smooth brain solution is have a small fat 32 drive that has the drivers for whatever file system you choose for everything for all of your os's sure But that seems like a lot more work in XFAT's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. You know, you still see FUD about NTFS on Linux being a bit shaky.

Windows can't read any of the Linux file systems natively. Like who knows what's going on with Mac OS. Like it's just XFAT is the lowest common denominator. So I'm thinking like terabyte or terabyte and a half partition XFAT. Just for it as a giant file dump. That seems right. I love a file dump. Like I said, I might put like a permanent Linux and Windows install after that on here just to have recovery emergency.

I like having a scratch Windows install for like questionable stuff, you know? So I was going to say the thing I do, I do VMs for that. Yeah, that also. Well, it depends on what you're doing, but yes, that is an option. Like when we streamed black and white a year or two ago, black and white. Yeah. But you have to do some weird.

dark sorcery to get black and white working on modern windows did you did you install the right version of outlook so it could look at your mailbox file and name all your villagers after your people wait wait it didn't actually do that did it oh yeah really yeah It would open your Outlook mailbox file and pull names from the people you converse with.

That's fucked up, but also kind of amazing. It's like, like they would definitely get in trouble for doing that now. But back then you're like, this is really cool. And definitely not at all a violation of my privacy. Yeah. So, okay. Case in point, you can see why I pulled out my, this was back when I had that SS.

has now become a scratch Linux drive in my desktop. But I used to have an old, like a scratch Windows install on an old external SSD. And I used it for exactly that. When I had to stream black and white, I booted my PC off of that scratch Windows install. So you didn't jack up windows. Yes, but had nothing important on it so that if all the weird fan mods I had to install to get black and white working did anything untoward, not a big deal. Anyway.

Yeah, I might have Windows and Linux installs on there. I'm also going to use this as a backup drive. Like this is full on. Next time I need to reinstall Windows, my Windows drive is just getting cloned to this thing. Yeah, so that's the benefit of having the big giant drives. You don't want to make your partition smaller than whatever your biggest SSD is.

That is exactly why I got the giant drive is I next time if either if Windows shits the bed or I'm just building a new PC and I just want to back up my entire old Windows install so I'd make sure I don't lose anything like it's really nice to just be able to image your entire boot drive to an external drive and just.

Let's not think about it. It's funny. I keep thinking about running a fiber into the NAS, into the office for the NAS specifically so that I can do high-speed images out to that because it takes so long over gigabit. But also just getting a four terabyte SSD is another viable alternative. As you said, if you want a big SSD, it might be time to get one sooner than later.

But on the system cloning thing, before we end this here, I will say Windows is still just a partition. They're not doing any weird sealed signed system volumes or immutable. containers or anything like that. It's just a partition. You can just use Clonezilla or whatever partition cloning thing you like. Just DD it if you want to take some time. That's probably what I will do now. I like DDing partitions now. But did you know?

There is a Apple has written a command line utility to back up the insane immutable like sealed Mac OS volume. Really? It's called ASR literally command. It's a literal command line utility in Mac OS. It's called ASR stands for Apple software restore. It has a man page. Wow. Like they wrote a man page for it. That's how much of a Unix ass Unix Mac OS is. This is.

This is secretly one of the topics I'm very excited to come on to the dual boot diaries and talk about sometime because I kind of want to blow Adam's mind when he finds out how much, how much. How many of the concepts he is coming to grips with in Linux actually also exist in macOS and some other operating systems? And like Apple, even for...

Even for software that Apple is developing to this day, they are still writing man pages for them because look, man, it's a certified Unix. Meanwhile, on the Windows side, their backup utility is just, hey, man, consider uploading all your shit to OneDrive. Yeah.

We should do a whole episode at some point about the Microsoft that could have been. If Microsoft had kept developing their Unix instead of moving to DOS, can you just imagine? what the computing world might be like now. It's a real testament that I'm looking back on the Balmer days and like being like, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was back then.

don't write in if you worked at microsoft during the bomber days don't send us letters about this we know i'm joking this is a joke yep yep but also damn hey brad if uh three ghosts visited Satya Nadella on Christmas Eve. Who would they be? Oh, man. Okay. I mean, Gates has to be one of them. I think it's Gates, Balmer, and Jay Allard. Oh, man.

I think bomber is the ghost of Christmas future. The old one, man. I was sure. I was editing a photo of Jay Allard. It's very afternoon. I mean, don't ask tip of the tongue, man. I'm trying to, like... Jay Allard's got to be Ghost at Christmas Past, right? Because he's back when Microsoft was good. Is that the split? Past is like the glory days, the salad days, like the...

I haven't seen Christmas or read Christmas Carol in a very long time. Okay, first off, there are two, just three, actually, really good Christmas Carol adaptations, and they're all worth watching. Mickey's Christmas Carol. Yes. Is the best of that era of Disney animation. Watched it last year. Quite short. It's like a half hour. 23 minutes. It's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. The George C. Scott one from like 1972. Yes. Incredible. Like my dad maintained.

has maintained forever that is the only christmas carol i would say that my my answer to what is the only christmas carol is the muppet christmas carol okay sure yes yeah okay yes i agreed on all points here um but yeah so so uh past is showing how things used to be in it when it was kind of good and like how before you were a real dill hole present is like the nightmare world that you've created today for people and future is

Your unfortunate end. Yeah, your future is where people spit on your grave and curse your memory. Yeah, how you end up being the worst person in the world. Yes. Man, okay, in that light. Maybe Bill Gates has passed. Maybe. I don't know. Bill Gates is future reading about the way. Yes. Reading about the way that he conducted business doings back in the day. He didn't seem like a nice guy. No, not especially. No. Hmm.

Man, this is a tough one. We're going to have to spend some time. We're going to write a whole screenplay out of this. Yeah, maybe write in. Write in with your guesses. TechPod at content.town or post them in the chat for the Discord.

I really miss Simpsons Fortnite. Dude, when I saw that you had put this in the notes, I was very excited because I don't know if you listen to every, probably not every episode of the Next Lander podcast, but I literally said this last week. We talked about the chapter finale. Yeah.

Because that thing wasn't so insane that as soon as it was over, I hit the record that button on the PS5 and sent them my footage. I was like, hey, we're going to talk about this anyway. You should probably see this beforehand because this is absolutely... Beyond. Had you never seen one of those before? No. And I don't know if they're all such unbelievable like IP slop farms. I mean.

there's usually a little bit of celebration of what came before and a little bit of foreshadowing of what's coming in the future. Yeah. I mean, the way I put it, this, this was basically a deleted scene from ready player one. I mean, it's completely.

chock-a-block with every property they have licensed for that game in the past 12 months just absurd yeah this one was more of that than the past ones like some of the past ones were like you got into a giant mecca and fought a monster and stuff like that And there were definitely IP tie-ins with those, but it wasn't quite as, it wasn't as overt as

The bride from Kill Bill driving up Godzilla's back to motorcycle off into a monster or whatever it was. While Superman is hovering over you like holding a boulder so you can drive. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. Anyway. In the course of that conversation, I then said, okay, then I turned around after that was over, played one match of the new season and had a violent, not my island reaction.

It's basically how I felt about it. I got in there and did one match and was just like, this feels wrong. Is this the experience everybody has at the beginning of a new season in that game? I really like that Simpsons Island and this is not my Fortnite. I haven't played a sense. Well, so as somebody who's played a fair amount of these kind of big, long running live service multiplayer games, there are kind of multiple strategies for how you manage it. Right. And one of them is that.

the meta never changes and like the gun that's good now will be the same the gun that's good three years from now and and you know like that's the kind of pub g and i think apex way probably i don't play a lot of apex these days um the other The other end of the extreme is what Fortnite does, which is just like...

they would lean real hard into meta and then they completely change it up at the season turn like you know that no matter how bad you don't like the current season you know it's going to be completely different at the start of the next season yeah so i like that for weapons like i found

Like even, even that one match I played, I was like, oh, these are new, these are new guns. That's fun to discover some new guns. But, but it was, I think it was more of the setting and layout. And like, you know, like I had learned the previous map and I, now I.

A, I didn't know where anything was. B, I kind of just don't love the aesthetic of this one compared to this. Granted, it's hard to beat the look of The Simpsons. I was going to say, The Simpsons is a gamble, right? Because you're coming off of... something that was really fun and novel and new and then you're going back to something that's completely different and and so like i i actually quite like the whole learning new map knowledge part of the part of the game because i think that's

Like that was the part of early PUBG that I really loved was like having good map knowledge for that first PUBG map gave you a huge advantage in combat because you knew where the cover was and you knew where the outs were. Like it made you more survivable and you knew where to do good ambushes and stuff like that. And it's nice that that changes in Fortnite. I'm really bummed.

And I realize it's like a giant business conversation licensing deal. But they have had things that stayed forever. So like the Daft Punk experience that they did last year, that if you I don't know if we've talked about this here, but it's. It's basically, they recreated the Alive 2007 tour and played the entire set list for that tour.

in like an arena style thing it is maybe the coolest music thing they've ever done and they've done a lot of cool music things that's pretty good um so like that you can still go play right now as far as i know i haven't looked at it since the season started but it was there like the last day of the last season And it's really exciting. The other thing that happens with Fortnite new seasons is they change technology. So usually a chapter is a new major.

major or minor branch of unreal five at this first thing okay so i don't know which one they're i think it's maybe five six or five seven um but they like the lumen and the lumen and um and uh

Nanite changes rolled out one season and like it's on down the line. So yeah, I don't know. I just want to go back to Springfield. This is where I'm at. Yeah. I honestly, I was pretty sad by the end of that season that there is no mode that lets you just explore that map at will without people shooting at you.

Yeah, I really I would have loved to spend an hour just looking through everything they built for that because they put a lot of art into that. It was it was a it was a it was a really, really cool thing that it's it's.

The only bummer is that it was behind a live service thing and it went away after a while. I'm sure it will come back next year or whatever. But if they make it an annual thing, that would be fun because I'm sure I'll be back for the Star Wars season in May, if nothing else. But like, I would absolutely come back for Simpsons as well. I mean, like.

Just looking around in Bart and Lisa's bedroom and seeing the things, you know, I don't, I don't treat it as like, Oh, I'm finally seeing the Simpsons house. Like it's just their interpretation of that. You know, it's not necessarily what the animators from the actual show would have put in there, but it's like. It's still an interesting enough facsimile.

of you know that you can kind of take it seriously and be like oh that's what bart has on his shelves like that's cool to see yeah it's it's funny because it's um we you know we have that lego simpsons house that we i bought years and years ago and has been built because my daughter played with it a lot as a as a kid um

and it's it's it's the same layout like it's same layout lego house same layout in the in the in the simpsons fortnight house so yeah yeah they made a cool thing they made a cool thing and then they took it away i guess that's as good a place as any to wrap it up Speaking of taking things away, we're going to end this podcast. Disgusted sigh. This is another cold open episode. Thank you for bearing with us. And hopefully you enjoyed and weren't too, too confused.

Yes. Perfect time of year for it, for a cold open episode. It is cold as hell out for folks who don't, who aren't around. We don't do this very often. This is a special treat, but we have a big giant list of cold open topics. And when it gets too full.

We're never going to get through them all. It's time for another cold open episode. So nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with small topics overflowing their whole. You know, there's a lot of topics that only deserve like five minutes of discussion. It turns out, yeah, sometimes even less. It turns out, if you'd like to support the show, if you want to find out how to get more out of your tech pod, you can go to patreon.com slash tech pod.

where for five bucks, you get access to the discord and you get the monthly patron exclusive episode where we talk about often a lot of smaller topics like this that are maybe a little more serious and a little more on topic than. you know, my heated mattress pad, which is seriously my favorite thing I've bought in years. We are listener supported. So without you all, we don't, we, you know, this is the only way we make money on the tech pod. So we appreciate everybody's support.

And again, it's patreon.com slash techpod where you can find out more information. Thank you to all of our patrons, but especially thank you to our executive producer tier patrons, including Jason Lee in Felicitas Rips. Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippet, Buddy Jerk, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you also so much. Yeah, we appreciate you. And that'll do it for us this week.

I think next week we have a ranking scheduled. Is that... Two weeks from now. Two weeks from now is a ranking. Next week, boy, teasing future episode topics. This is very unlike us. Well, we know what they are, so we can tease them. For once, we know what they are ahead of time.

Next week, we're looking at a year-end wrap-up, year-end tech kind of situation. The good and the bad. Exactly. So, yeah, we have that next week. Then we have the ranking of the week after that. That will do it for us this week, though. So, as always, please. Consider the environment before printing this podcast.